Toma didn't attack.
He fell down the beam of support as though he were a rock, and struck the roof of the truck that Malik was driving the weight with a shriek such gentleness that it was almost the gentleness of having been walking down a surface since his childhood. He sat on the edge with one leg hanging over the side and turned to Malik as they would be friends out to have a drink together. The show-train continued. This was a no-choice situation. To have ceased was to have died, and to die was to leave the children to the mercies of Jaro.
Malik was stiff, with chains behind his wrists, scars along his collarbones blistering with Ruin. His body ached with the agony of his muscles yearning to attack. He didn't. Toma wished that where he would swing first and demonstrate that nothing was different, that Malik was still the hot-blooded pupil, unable to think three moves ahead.
Still carrying people, you know. You still carry them," Toma said in a voice that was light, almost affectionate. His dishevelled, black hair was blown by the wind, and plashed over his amber eyes. He didn't brush it away. And how many have fallen down nohn since I went?
"Less than you've dropped."
Toma laughed. True, sincere, so very wrong as to sing a lullaby to a tomb. I never drop them, Malik. I just give up on pretending that the bridge was not broken.
Three years ago. The dojo burning.
The prayer and the overpass monastery were suspended by cables and both were not working. The eastern wing was burned away by the fire, the night sky choking with smoke of orange and black. Their common lover, Rika senior sister, the only woman who had ever gotten Toma to smile was on a precarious footing of bridge and her leg was smashed with a broken beam. Thick and black, Blood pooled beneath her, soaked into the cracked concrete.
She was begging. She had been begging her life that many years ago, not of Rika. She was pleading with them to take her. To forsake her, is unwise.
Toma got on his knees next to her. It was a large, rather soft, face in the fire-light, the face which he used when he followed the lines of her scars on her thighs and had said they were beautiful. He put his hand upon her cheek. She bent his palm, making furrows in the black.
And he kissed her forehead. Soft. Lingering.
Then he got on his feet and walked towards the last supporting cable and cut it.
The scream of Rika went down with her into the toxic flood below in something that sounded, but was not, human. Malik's scream was louder. He threw himself at Toma, but before he could succeed, the bridge was collapsing, already breaking apart and by the time he got himself on his feet, Toma had disappeared. Riding a slab of concrete surf-boarding down in, and laughing as you did the smoke.
On the night he come into the camp of Jaro bearing the cut-off head of the Bone Saint as a present.
Present. The truck bounced across a section of road that had been smashed. Neither man moved.
There was the memory surface in the eyes of Malik; that Toma perceived the scars flaring painfully. He smiled wider. You are still dreaming of her. Not me. And he yawned and was as feline as possible, with popping joints. I rallied peace with that which the roadwise demands.
Malik had a gravel voice. You reconciled yourself to be a coward.
"Pussy. survivor. the road does not mind the difference. Toma rose, sweeping dust off his haori which was cropped. "Jaro greets you, Incidentally. He desires the secrets of the Ninth Scar to be cut in your pretty flesh. I informed him I would convey them myself.
Then he moved.
Cracked Lane Step a discontinuous rhythm, a load to compensate the loss of roadway. One second Toma stood on the edge of the truck. The second, he found himself in the guard of Malik, and could smell the oil upon his flesh, and his palm was just one inch over his throat. Killing intent was in the air between them.
Malik didn't flinch. Didn't blink.
Their eyes locked. The smile on Toma grew a little closer to the smile he would have done in the times when he was still a brother; and then the highway beckoned his heart away.
Still too slow to strike me, Toma whispered to myself. "Too stubborn to flee. Things never change.
The man leaped off the truck and landed on an oncoming scrap hauler heading in the other direction. His voice rose above the scream of the engines in their death agony: 'Let the doctor know I like her sutures. It is very clean work. I shall have the benefit of seeing them anew in a short time.
His fingers matched the part of the neck that Toma had been feeling. A Span Bite had welled up a thin line of blood, and had never struck but had cut. Catmass touched it with a damp cloth it was as clinical as lingering.
He is fooling around with you.
Malik gazed at the horizon where Toma went. "He's always played."
Her palm flattened across his chest, over his heart and she could feel the hard-thrumming beneath the scar and the mourning. A long time elapsed before she made a reply. after which silence: Do not, do not, I said to myself, nourish him out of you.
Through the second truck Jun was heard cutting out the growl of the engines. Shaking. Raw.
The road ahead It is very singing, it is wrong.
Old Jina spat rust phlegm, and cursed. Flooded megalopolis. Territory of roofs.
The world opened up on the convoy as it topped one of the rises.
The Aqua Spire was the skeleton of a sunken god, reemerged of the black water. Broken angle sunken towers stuck out, linked together by rope bridges, scrap metal platforms, which swung in the unhealthy wind. The neon burned faintly in a sickly green, dying blue flicker against the blackness, on the oil-laden surface, like a reflector.
And in some of those roofs, reverberating on either side of the water, a laugh of a woman.
Not cruel. Not kind.
Hungry.
Waiting the Smiling Champion.